Remembering
by coefficientheidi
Summary: I can't remember the first time that I touched myself, but I can remember the first time that I began to question the behavior.
1. Part 1

I can't remember the first time that I touched myself, but I can remember the first time that I began to question the behavior. I can remember running my fingers along my flesh and thinking that this was the reason I had been thrown away. This thing that I was grasping was what had made me unwanted.

I remember feeling angry about it for the first time—angry because it felt good. How could this simple part of me be wrong? This organ was something which I ought to associate with pleasure. Pleasure, then, had resulted in my abandonment.

Perhaps I should have felt pride at what had freed me from that horrid island in the sky, but I could not. I could not be reasonable. It is always a bad idea to think too much, and yet I could not bring myself to stop.

Eventually, thinking brought me to action, as it always tends to do.

At first, I simply squeezed too hard - a mild discomfort. Although I was young, many of my experiences up to that point had been unpleasant, and so I found this one to be more than tolerable. But I was not in the mood for that. This was not something which I deserved to tolerate. Toleration I would not allow.

I began to hurt myself.

It was nothing. Just a nick or scratch here and there. My finger had slipped, I could have told someone who asked. A lapse in coordination had brought that scrape into existence, I could have said, had anyone cared. But they didn't, because they didn't know, because no one could know and there was no one to know, anyway. It was my secret, and I liked it that way. It was something to wrap around myself when the world became too quiet, logic to feed my hungry mind whenever something went wrong—that thing, tucked away beneath my pants and my cloak, that was the reason why.

I remember going too far.

I remember sleeping outside in the cold, wet grass, the sounds of night punctuated by the sounds of fucking inside the cave.

_Fuck, fuck, fuck. _

I remember being jealous of the bandits because they could fuck and make noises like that whenever they wanted to. The most I was capable of was doing things to myself, though when I did, all that I wanted to do was scream at the sheer agony of it. I could not imagine doing those things with someone else, and I did not want to.

One evening, when my time with them was nearly through, one of the bandits brought me a demon girl. She had brown eyes and rumpled hair, and soft ears atop her head. I suppose he wished her to lay with me. Whenever she looked at me, her eyes glistened in a peculiarly docile way.

She smelled of other males. Perhaps she did not realize, but it was nearly overwhelming to me.

I remember desiring companionship. A part of me wished nothing more than to hold her, to be held by someone else, but I knew as she approached me that I would not be allowed so simple a comfort. Why should I bother to desire it? The moment she put her hands on me, it took all of my willpower to suppress the urge to slice them off her arms. The threats which spilled from my mouth slid off of her soft skin like rainwater over feathers of a bird. It probably made her want to fuck even more, and in a way, I could not blame her for that.

I remember running away. I remember leaving her there and returning the next morning to find her in another's embrace. The time in between I spent trying to escape—successfully from them, unsuccessfully from myself.

I remember feeling lonely and confused. I remember thinking that the only reason I existed was because two people had fucked, and maybe it had meant as little to them as it meant to everyone else. I was here because nothing meant anything. I was hurting, drowning in a seemingly unending sea of my own inner turmoil, and the only thing I could possibly know to do was create more pain.

I remember pulling violently at myself. I remember wanting to tear it off. I remember being blinded by rage at even having it there to begin with. I remember it being too dark to see the moisture when I withdrew my hand, and I remember the warm wetness that seeped through my pants while I failed to sleep.

For days after, I pretended—mostly for my own benefit—that nothing had happened. It didn't matter, anyway. The soreness when I walked, the stinging sensation when I bathed, the blood when I urinated—those were all temporary. Weeks later, by the time I had left to find the place of my birth, all of my injuries had healed—all except the ones deep inside, for which I had yet to find cures.


	2. Part 2

What if I could not feel real pleasure anymore?

I had done it to myself, and perhaps it was, at times, inconvenient.

A learned response.

Maybe I had never known what arousal felt like, not really. My pleasure wasn't direct. All that I felt was pain, but it was something. I was feeling. I wanted to feel. The world was empty and cold without that.

Anguish fueled my passion. Every opponent I faced, I would experience the same. Sometimes I would allow them to hurt me, just so that I could feel more. And when it all became too much, those sensations burned inside of me until I reached the top, only to cycle through again for the next time I felt the urge.

I knew I had become obsessed. Sex, such a trivial act—and of little use to me. Sex only created problems. It was a distraction from greater things. Sex would only prevent me from having what I wanted.

I did not want to fuck any of these creatures. No, I wanted to kill them.

I wanted to bleed; I wanted to see them bleed. I wanted to experience the sweet release that came only with the imperceptible sound of tendons snapping beneath the razor-sharp blade of my sword. Delicate, fragile living beings: It requires so very little to end them.

Years later, after Sensui had gone, after I had acquired an irritating gaggle of other loud-mouthed distractions, I felt better about myself. I had learned, and I found my sister. I had found my birthplace; I had begun to rebirth myself.

Then I met her.

If everyone else I had faced made me burn, she made me broil.

It was sickening, how much she could make me feel. The worst part was that she didn't even have to try. Of anyone in the world, she could injure me best, but she wouldn't do it right. She wouldn't listen.

She held me.

She told me about herself.

She showed me her naked body.

Is this the way things were supposed to happen?

If only she could have known what a horrible mistake she was making. She was offering me something new, something that I had spent my entire life wishing for.

I wanted to belong. Maybe I could belong with her, I thought.

I began to want more things, other things, strange things. But she was not so certain. She guarded herself so heavily. She was confused, just as she always had been. She didn't know how she had gotten where she was or where to go next, although she had been here for quite a while. I, on the other hand, remembered everything. At night, every foolish choice I'd made splattered upon the periphery of my dreams while I slept. I had succumbed to the bitter reality of it such a long time ago. Perhaps I had never cared. I didn't know which part of me was good or bad or right or wrong anymore. Such things are trivial to think on.

And yet she worried herself endlessly. She thought she could hide, but I could always tell. Such a beautiful creature, attempting to push it all away.

I realized I did not feel as much pain anymore, being with her. Not enough. It upset me. On her own, she would not physically harm me, though she was more than capable of doing so. I began to provoke her. A snide comment, a veiled insult. Sometimes these elicited no response—or a self-degrading retort, which I especially hated because they made me feel strangely guilty—but other times, she would hit me.

"Perhaps you ought to stop behaving like a useless old bitch," I would say to her. This always made her very angry. I felt I had armed myself with everything that could possibly upset her, daggers to sling whenever I wanted her hands on me.

She would send me reeling back, and I would rebound, tackling her to the ground. Blindly, we would throw punches, screaming, grunting, sweating. I was incapable of fighting with the intention of wounding her, but I needed her to wound me. I needed her to make me feel good, and this kind of good was all that I knew. No one else would do.

I began to memorize her scent. It clung to my clothing, for I found myself less willing to bathe when I had recently had an altercation with her. I learned the taste of her skin through all the times I had bitten her during our quarrels—harmless urgings to get her to punch me harder. Sometimes, afterwards, when our bodies were heaving, I would allow myself several seconds to touch her scarred face. On a rare occasion, she looked me in the eye while I did.

I wanted to fuck her, but I also did not want to use that word. The problem was that I didn't know what else to call it. Something as simple as sex did not seem to encompass what I wanted with her. All I knew was that for the first time in my life, I wanted to use my body for something other than destruction. I wanted to put my penis inside of her. I wanted to put my fingers inside of her. I wanted to plow into her. I wanted to put my mouth on her. I wanted to claw at her and move with her until we were both too exhausted to think about anything at all.

And that was when, by some bizarre twist, I realized that I trusted her. I must have trusted her considerably. I trusted her with my being.

When we finally touched, I was too confused to be coherent. It was a clumsy, passionate debacle. Maybe we both wanted it, but we just didn't know how. She touched me with her flesh hand, her slender fingers caressing the part of me that I had hated so much—the part I had, at more than one point in my life, wanted to get rid of. Her eye flickered with hesitance, uncertainty, terror—and something else. Something almost tender. I couldn't imagine whether she understood what I had done, what I had felt. She knew things about me that I had never shared with another soul, but not everything could be shared. Ultimately, my pain is mine alone.

If she knew my thoughts, she did not speak of them. She merely pressed her lips against my neck, the first in a chronicle of achingly affectionate gestures we would exchange, and moved her hand faster.

She felt me, and all I felt was pleasure.


End file.
